Affiliations: [a] Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science, University of Torino, Italy | [b] Ausiliatrice Hospital, Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi-ONLUS, Turin, Italy
Correspondence:
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Address for correspondence: Marco Tamietto, Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Torino, Via Po 14, 10123, Torino, Italy. Tel.: +39 011 670 30 65; Fax: +39 011 814 62 31; E-mail: tamietto@psych.unito.it
Abstract: Development of reliable procedures to assess fitness to safe driving after traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a crucial step in rehabilitation. However, prior studies are highly inconsistent in the choice of measures recommended for predicting driving fitness from different pre-driving measures. In the present paper the relevant literature is reviewed with the aim of shedding light on the reasons for these inconsistencies. The discrepant results reflect investigative choices which differ in five aspects: (1) the type of predictors used as pre-driving screening; (2) the type of measures considered as the criterion for the determination of fitness to drive after TBI; (3) the severity of the TBI in the sample of patients studied; (4) the extent of the neural structures damaged by TBI and the overlap of these areas with those involved in driving tasks; (5) the length of the follow-up considered. The strengths and weaknesses of the different methods and measures are discussed with their implications for future research and clinical rehabilitation. Encouraging findings come from recent studies that combined together medical, psychosocial, and personality measures, thereby improving the explanatory power of the predictors used. The use of post-injury driving fitness measures with great ecological and external validity seems equally promising in assessing actual driving in the real world.
